Wednesday, August 19. 2015

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” With this cartoon caption by Peter Steiner, the American weekly magazine The New Yorker celebrated the emergence of the Web in 1993. It features a dog, seated in front of a computer, talking to his furry companion. With these words, which have become since legendary, he explains what was at the time one of the main features of the nascent network: the possibility of being anonymous. A liberating cyberspace where gender, race and appearance are irrelevant, where real identity is unimportant and where everyone, protected by anonymity, can reinvent themselves online.

Google Portrait

Sixteen years later, in 2009, Le Tigre, an independent magazine based in Paris, published a “Google portrait” of the anonymous Marc L. Over a two-page spread in its 28th Volume, it read: “Happy Birthday Marc. On 5th December 2008 you will celebrate your 29th birthday. Can we speak as friends? It is true that you don’t know me. But I know you very well. You are the (un)lucky candidate for the first Le Tigre Google portrait. The idea behind this column is simple: we select someone anonymous and present their life based on the traces they leave on the Internet, voluntarily or otherwise.”

A media uproar ensued. From the 8 p.m. television news broadcast on French channel TF1 to the Le Monde daily newspaper, as well as blogs and forums, everyone was talking about the private life of this ordinary Internet user laid out for all to see. Raphaël Meltz, author of the article and director of Le Tigre, had put together by hand stray fragments of information found on YouTube, Flickr photos, etc., combined with Google searches and, more marginally then, Facebook. The result was a rather precise literary portrait, revealing his holiday travels, musical tastes, exes, and more. The magazine took full responsibility for this revelation, wanting to highlight “the idea that we don’t really realise what private information about ourselves is available on the Internet and that, gathered and summarized, this information can present a worrying picture.”

Such articles provoked a sudden awareness that our most private data are collected and exploited by private companies for profit. This population profiling became systematic with the emergence of the Big Data era. Furthermore, with the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden about the mass surveillance conducted by America’s National Security Agency (NSA), the general public discovered that it is not only the corporate giants of the Internet who collect and exploit our data and metadata, but that even our governments, the American government foremost – but also France, which tapped underwater cables – spy on their own people, under the pretext of combating terrorism.

Black Boxes

On 2nd June 2015, faced with the NSA “collect it all” scandal, the U.S. Senate approved the USA Freedom Act, which restricts the bulk collection of telephone data. But the security measures established by the American intelligence agency continue to make their mark across Europe. On Wednesday 24th June, the Intelligence law, which outlines an unprecedented extension of the powers of the national intelligence services, was overwhelmingly approved in France. This French-style “Patriot Act” gives them the same types of powers as their American counterparts.

The proposed legislation, assessed during an emergency motion in the wake of the attacks against Charlie Hebdo, legalizes mass automated surveillance of the population via the non-transparent use of cookies – the infamous black boxes (purportedly algorithms supposed to detect terrorist behaviour on the Internet) – which will be used by Internet access providers and hosts.

The French National Digital Council, an independent advisory committee, laments the “extremely widespread nature of these measures”, which manifest as “indiscriminate surveillance bordering on mass surveillance” and position “algorithms at the heart of our mode of governance”. Despite the hostile campaign led by a large section of civil society, which lambasts the law for its lack of opposition forces and the intrusive nature of the techniques it condones, opponents did not succeed in mobilising the general public, who are resigned (although not consenting), generally divided between feelings of inevitability and powerlessness.

Long before the former employee of the NSA revealed the extent of violation of civil liberties taking place, particularly with the Prism programme that gives the intelligence agency direct access to the servers and data of nine Internet giants (including Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo), experts within the network alerted the public to these data collections on the Web.

Expert Albertine Meunier has scrupulously compiled her Google searches ever since 2006, the year in which Google launched its Search History service, which stores Internet user requests. In My Google Search History, a long-term project, Albertine Meunier presents the exhaustive inventory of her day-to-day searches, detailed as a list of key words, recited by a synthetic voice, presented in a video and also available in book form. This collection of requests gives a precise idea of her preoccupations and reveals the unbelievable amount of information Google has on us all. “Nobody knows you as well as that, not even the person you share your life with,” she claims. Read chronologically, Albertine Meunier’s searches tell a story: her own, but also the story of the Web.

Precarious Identities

Since the launch of Web 2.0, the concept of identity has changed profoundly, according to Christophe Bruno, the curator in 2011 of the online exhibition entitled Identités précaires [Precarious Identities] , in the virtual Jeu de Paume space in Paris: “While with Google you remained the provisional and unstable sum of all your words broadcast online, on Facebook you are required to give your real identity from the start. The dissolution and blurring of genders and types has been replaced by a return to the normative notion of identity.”

In the early days of the Web, “evading identity” was one of the favourite activities of net experts and media-activists who liked to provoke confusion by creating false profiles, fictional avatars, collective identities and pseudonyms, making the Internet an exciting game field. Players have ranged from Mouchette.org, the first fictional star of the Internet in 1996, to Luther Blisset, the elusive Robin Hood of the information age, whose pseudonym has since been adopted by hundreds of international experts and activists since 1994, along with the Yes Men, “identity correctors” and Anonymous legions.

From there on in, security madness and selling of personal data have contributed to the pressure to make online and legal identities irrevocably coincide. Heath Bunting foresaw this phenomenon in 1998, before the “dot.com” explosion that ended the Internet utopia. In _Readme.html, he was already proposing invisibility to counteract the commoditization of the self and is currently working on the Status Project, a construction kit of new legal identities.

The year 2010 saw a wave of virtual suicides, whereby profiles were removed from social networking sites, seen as instruments of domestication and exploitation with the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine or Seppukoo or the mysterious collective Les Liens Invisibles, furthermore encouraging people to “free the digital system of any and all identity stifling.”

Users have only a rough understanding of this identity broadcast across networks, while operators, sellers, search engines and information services alike know more about our digital behaviour than we do ourselves, as they can archive, cross-check and model our data. In the full swing of the predictive web boom, “algorithms are now able to predict your purchases and even directly validate delivery before you have even clicked on the ‘purchase’ button. They can also detect ‘terrorist behaviour’, along with ‘compulsive gambling or pathological behaviours’”, observes Olivier Ertzscheid, a university lecturer in Information Sciences, author of Qu’est-ce que l’identité numérique? [What is Digital Identity?] , which highlights the dangers such “black-listing” represents for democracy. The foremost protection against “identity expropriation” we must implement consequently requires regaining control over the management of our records.

Predicting Behaviour

The Intelligence legislation anticipates algorithms that are able to detect suspicious behaviour. It remains to be seen to what extent an identity can be “calculated”, and what are the potential strategies to counteract this “big data ideology”. “The risk is even greater because it is not directly perceptible. Our behaviour risks progressively and painlessly adapting to this kind of well-thinking, political correctness and self-censorship of our ideas and movements on the Internet,” warns legal researcher Antoinette Rouvroy, author of the concept of “algorithmic governmentality”. Her warning comes against a backdrop of fear of the progressive emergence of a mainstream system and way of life which does not tolerate the slightest contradictory position, deviation or unique social (or digital) practice.

For the Streaming Egos project, in the specific context of the French Intelligence legislation, we will attempt to analyse the way these algorithms work and reclaim these data mining tools, implementing strategies to counteract such surveillance (obfuscation, camouflage, false positives, etc.) and assess the possibility of creating an operational identity, both administrative and digital.